Posts Tagged ‘journalism success’

As a guiding principle life shrinks and life expands in direct proportion to your willingness to assume risk.

Casey Neistat, filmmaker

There is a huge difference between making it within a system, and making it on your own terms.

Jostling along the path of freelance journalism, I’ve increasingly found that the clutch of bylines I’ve accumulated count for very little. All it means is that when I pitch or when I get emails out of the blue, from editors, I just have that little more cache.

It affords me more freedom; the ability to take up stories that really interest me. And take punts on travel.

Butyou will never make it.

Not as a freelance journalist.

But you may do as a bonafide writer. Or some other high-powered creative.

So how do you break out of the tiny little achievements that you get as a freelancer? By focusing less on the litany of tasks that require urgent deadlines, and focusing more on the slow long-term creative projects that once produced and completed will be of higher value.

Why?

Because that kind of work is hard. And harder to replicate.

That is how your define your own path.

This is a continuing series exploring the strategies of success of journalists and writers. Part one in the series can be found here – and here is the previous entry.

This is a continuing series exploring the strategies of success of journalists and writers. Parts one and two in the series can be found here and here.

Christopher Nolan is a film director with great power in Hollywood. He’s known for producing blockbuster movies – like his Dark Knight Batman trilogy – under budget and before deadline. Recently I read a brilliant profile of the British filmmaker written by Tom Shone; it’s an excellently reported piece.

What makes the article special is its description of Nolan’s commitment to his craft, emphasizing his abilities of focus to art and craft.

*

Cal Newport’s blog focuses on how people achieve success by continually bettering their skills. It’s a must-read blog for me. One of his mantras, culled from comedian Steve Martin’s memoir, is: “Be so good they can’t ignore you”. Newport emphasizes that to be not just good, but truly great, to rise to the top where the best get unduly rewarded, you have to focus not just on improving your skills – a given – but to concentrate your efforts on projects that will generate massive returns.

Patrick Kingsley (left) is a 25-year-old journalist, currently Egypt correspondent for The Guardian. His rise has been precipitous.

Some journalists and writers seem to rise out of no-where, their names shared around all of a sudden. Laurie Penny arrived after being noticed for blog-posts about politics. Owen Jones arrived in similar fashion, helped along with the publication of his zeitgeisty book.

Some have a dizzying ascent, characterized by bravado and a ferocious intellect. But a rapid fall can also occur: Johann Hari, Jonah Lehrer. Say what you will about Hari but he made his name with a series of columns – one in which he seduced a homophobic neo-Nazi – that were breathtakingly audacious.

On this blog you can find posts with interviews and profiles of journalists who’ve ‘made it’. Their paths to success can be determined or rather fortunate. But we all like to know other people’s ‘secret’ to success, so that we might copy the route.

It’s certainly something I like to ponder. But having vaguely defined goals or even closely set markers of achievement may not be enough. There has to be a system.

Of the journalists whose bylines are worth remembering, there seems to be 3 underlying factors to their success:

1. The Precocious Upstart

They write a book, an article (or series of), or start a blog which either catches some part of the popular imagination, or comes to the attention of a few influential editors, writers.

After many years refining their craft, they ‘break out’ with sensation-making articles, noted for either their writing style, depth of reporting and story-telling skills, or innovative choice of subject matter.

These are those who are given an opportunity – work experience at The Guardian say, or who got a chance start at a national newspaper or magazine, and then proceeded to impress with their originality, cleverness or diligence.

Getting your name recognised and winning a certain level of renown is not simply down to you of course. Other people have to be talking about you, discussing your work and wondering about the person behind it. Maybe they admire your way of thinking or your audacity. It is not a science.

To get to that stage, it should go without saying that doing good work, showing originality and verve in your work is requisite. But plenty of freelancers or even seasoned journalists do this. What separates those who do good work but remain relatively anonymous, their bylines not expected with a certain drool-worthy eagerness, from those whose writing and reporting commands attention, higher fees and reader loyalty?

Over this spring season, I’ll be analysing just why in this series. Look for the ‘How to make a name for yourself’ blog titles.

About

Lu-Hai Liang has been published in The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, CNN, Aljazeera, New Statesman, The Atlantic, WIRED, and many more. He is a freelance journalist who lived for six years in Beijing, but is now recovering elsewhere. You can learn more about him here.

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